Analysing transformation challenges through policy instruments: Shifting ideas of social control in the implementation of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy in Germany (2023-2027)

Agricultural policy has generated empirical evidence for theoretical developments in political science in many cases over the years. In particular, research on the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) has provided important insights to explain how policy instruments are chosen to achieve changing policy goals, highlighting, e.g., policy networks, path dependency, or policy paradigms. An important aspect that has received limited consideration in the CAP literature is that instruments are not merely tools to achieve contingent objectives, but also bearers of information about political interactions. Following a political sociology perspective, policy instruments “reveal a (fairly explicit) theorisation of the relationship between the governing and the governed” (Lascoumes & Le Gales, 2007, p. 11). They constitute a “condensed form of knowledge about social control and ways of exercising it” (ibid.). In this research, we examine shifting ideas of social control underlying policy instruments, using the implementation of the CAP 2023 to 2027 in Germany as an example. Since 1992, a series of CAP reforms have added sustainability-related instruments and objectives. However, rather than effectively addressing challenges such as environmental degradation or animal welfare, they primarily sustain the exceptionalist legacy of farm income support. By examining the CAP from a political sociology perspective, Grant (2010) has shown how policy changes can be explained by the exhaustion and long-term contradictions of instruments that in the 1990s were no longer in tune with broader political trends. Internal contradictions and external pressures combined led to a substantial change away from price support towards direct income transfers. More than a decade after Grant’s analysis, it is time to re-assess the role of CAP’s internal contradictions and external pressures, given the enormous challenges reflected e.g. in the European Green Deal. We ask what the CAP instruments tell about the governing of transition and transformation challenges. Based on a qualitative content analysis of the legislative texts for the CAP 2023-2027 and its implementation in Germany, we reconstruct the implicit theories of social control underlying the changing policy instruments in the CAP. The recent reform introduced a "new delivery model" that requires member states to link all instruments – including income support measures – to specific objectives, and explain the intervention mechanism. While this reflects external pressures to legitimize the CAP, it also betrays shifting theories of social control. New instruments e.g. Eco Schemes, Social Conditionality or animal-related interventions indicate that long-established income transfers are increasingly linked socially desired outcomes. The new governance arrangement expands public authorities’ and taxpayers’ ways to control farming practices. This in turn reflects broader changes in human-nature, human-animal and human-human relationships, the rise of the environmental state and Shifts in EU relations with its member states. By using the example of the CAP and reconstructing the shifting theories of social control implicit in its policy instruments, this research adds to previous understandings of policy instruments’ role in transition and transformation processes by adding a more nuanced understanding of the location and the functioning of power relations in the CAP, and in policy mixes in general.